My France – Si�n Lloyd

Award-winning weather presenter Si�n Lloyd tells Eleanor Fullalove why she loves Paris, how she has scaled Mont Blanc and has performed with the girls from the Moulin Rouge

Award-winning weather presenter Si�n Lloyd tells Eleanor Fullalove why she loves Paris, how she has scaled Mont Blanc and has performed with the girls from the Moulin RougeI hear you’ve been spending time in Paris…My husband Jonathan works for the F�d�ration Internationale de l’Automobile and their head office is in Paris, so we go a lot. And my sister lives there. I couldn’t be luckier – I can go out on the Eurostar with Jonathan and meet up with my sister for nice little lunches. I’d never fly.

Where is your sister based and what is special about the arrondissement? Ceri lives just by the Eiffel Tower. There seem to be a lot of good local bistros where you can eat al fresco around Les Invalides. It’s spacious and quite green. The weather’s more dependable than here. Eating out with friends and people you love is the best thing you can do. On the other side [of Les Invalides] there’s the French parliament. Ceri and her husband have pinpointed where the top ministers go. You can bet your bottom dollar that they are the best places and value for money as well, so we tend to go to them.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re in Paris?We go to museums, we walk through parks, we go to clothes shops – to look as opposed to buy, with the euro the way it is at the moment.

Have you picked up much French? I’m not bad. I think it’s the age-old thing of understanding just about everything, but it’s when you come to speak it… It takes me a week or so to get into the swing of things. My mother was a French teacher. By the time we went to senior school, I probably had quite a smattering of French. I’m all for that. What do you enjoy most about French culture?Their attitude towards food is so completely different from ours. You can go to a chocolatier and they will speak to you for hours. The information and the passion they have for these things are what I love about the dining experience in France. My father is a bit of a foodie and for his birthday we took him to Michel Gu�rard’s restaurant. He was as happy as Larry because the waiters would point out that there was such and such an ingredient in the dish, and explain why one cream was better than another sort.

If you had to choose just one g�teau from a p�tisserie, which would it be?I do like a religieuse – a coffee flavoured one. The choux pastry in France is like no other!

You enjoy hiking in your free time and have scaled Mont Blanc – what was that like? I belong to a walking gang and every year we do a charity trek. The circuit of Mont Blanc was three years ago. It was tough and took about five days. It was very steep, but we stayed in gorgeous chalets and had great rustic food – lots of melted cheese and potato.

Tell me about your experience of hitchhiking with your sister as a student in France. Our first stop was Paris, where we were robbed. We went to Europ Assistance to report the theft. The guy working there was doing a holiday job and, as we were bereft in Paris, he invited us to go with him to visit his best friend in the Loire. We went in his cranky 2CV and that was the night my sister met her husband-to-be.

You performed the cancan with the Moulin Rouge girls in Paris for a Welsh reality TV show. Was it difficult? There was a lot to learn. I can remember how to lift the skirts – there’s a certain way of doing that. One of them could actually raise her legs to touch her nose. It was a brilliant workout, it could be the next craze couldn’t it? The music makes you laugh.

You were also in Paris to pick up an award for Best Weather Presenter in the World some years ago…There’s a suburb called Issy-les-Moulineaux – the mayor was a complete weather buff, so he held an International Weather Festival with forecasters from China, Cuba, Russia, America… followed by an incredibly glitzy prize-giving with Vanessa Paradis!